Tag: forward planning

Working in PR and communications is stressful, according to the recent CIPR state of the profession report, around one in six PR professionals (16%) report living with a mental health condition – an increase of 10% from the year before. Any percentage increase is a concern, and highlights that more needs to be done in our industry to address this. It’s fine to have policies in place but we need managers to recognise that their staff are their most important assets and happy healthy staff make for a productive work force. KPIs are important but so is mental wellness.

Like many I have suffered with depression myself, I recall working for a very well-known organisation, responsible for one of the largest and busiest directorate’s, my daughter was in nursery but was due to start primary school so I knew that I would have to look into flexible working to accommodate this.

I was juggling motherhood, the pressures of working in a high-profile press office and some personal family issues in addition to preparing for the transition from nursery to school and waiting for acceptance into both breakfast and afterschool clubs.

This is a piece I wrote for Mental Health Awareness Week, published in CIPR’s Influence Online magazine you can read the rest here

Happy New Year all, 2016 is here already and the festive season is well and truly over and I’m sure many of you can tell by the extra people at the gym, working on their 2016 fitness resolutions following an indulgent end to 2015.

The New Year gives us all a chance to refresh, start again or start anew. We can do this any day of the year but the start of the year just feels right.

Now I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but psychologists do say that only one in 10 of us will actually reach our resolution goals and this could be down to fact that we set so many!

So with that in mind whether you’ve set goals for business or personal, I want you to stay on track and reach them so here are some helpful tips.

Forward Plan – whether you are planning to improve business or yourself it’s crucial to plan, write down your plans and how you plan to achieve your goals –like the saying goes.. if you fail to plan you plan to fail.

Manage your objectives – don’t try and do everything at once, break down you objectives so that you can deal with them in a timely and measurable way, remember less is more overwhelming yourself will just leave you stressed.

Keep track of your plans – by creating a checklist, spreadsheet or journal and as you achieve your objectives you can tick them off – soon enough it will be filled with ticks and you’ll be feeling accomplished.

Reward yourself for the goals you’ve reached – this will help you stay motivated.

Tell others about your goals – this can help give you accountability and support for your goals. If nobody knows you plan to lose weight or take over the world with your business then it’s easy to slip back into old habits or the lets do it later attitude. If you let others know it will spur you on to met your goals.